Looper & Friends

So this Looper movie that opened on Friday, it is indeed pretty good, and I'd highly recommend the JABberwocky client list, many/most of whom have an inner sf geek, go and see it.

The barest bones of the concept:  we have time travel, since time travel is illegal only criminals travel in time, and criminals are sent back 30 years to be offed, in fact there are dedicated specialists who take care of that. Every once in a while, the specialist gets to "close the loop," kiling the 30-years-in-future version of himself that's just been sent 30 years into the future's past.  Yes, it's a time travel movie, so if this explanation is hard to follow don't blame me.  And specifically here, the future has a guy called "the rainmaker" who is taking over the mobs en masse, closing loops en masse, sending all his enemies back in time.  Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis play the same dude, the +30 and the -30 versions.  Bruce Willis doesn't want his loop to be closed, he wants to find and kill the person who's going to become "the rainmaker," this will not endear either of them to the mob headed by Jeff Bridges that runs the whole looper thing in the -30.

Mostly, this is handled with lots of pluses.  Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed, has an ace cast and an ace tech team, and the movie is well made, suspenseful, not without its bits of humor.

The time travel?  Well, it makes sense.  Or it makes as much sense as it can.  Like any time travel movie, if you get to thinking too hard about the consequences of the things that happen, you realize it's all quite nonsensical.  But Goldilocks would approve of the way the script makes just enough effort to make all of this seem logical complete with just enough hand-waving to cover up the illogic that you're willing to cut it some slack.

It's a nice contrast to some of the other attempts Hollywood will take to deal with sf themes, like the laughable In Time from a year ago.

Though just to say, for anyone who's seen, as one good example, Brian de Palma's The Fury, there's a scene that should easily reveal the identity of The Rainmaker long before the characters in the film get around to figuring it out.

Also worth seeing:  Michael Pena and Jake Gyllenhal in End of Watch.

Another auteur genre piece, this one written and directed by David Ayer,whom the posters remind us wrote the script for Training Day.

More good casting.  Gyllenhal and Pena have amazing chemistry and rapport together, and the script requires them to say things that always seem right, even at their most cliche.

As with Looper, a bit of slack needs to be cut.  The good guys can spend the whole movie radioing for backup and have it come nicely and quickly, until the final act when the back-up is most desperately needed and all of a sudden it's like the additional units need to drive to South Central from Santa Barbara.

This isn't Training Day.  It's a movie, and shit happens, but it's the cop drama that really has only the nicest things to say about cops.

It's safe to say I made the right decision to head to the movies after the first act of Harper Reagan, a play from an up-and-coming British playwright that makes it to New York a few years after a London debut.  A series of two-character scenes about a women I don't care about with family trouble I don't care about meeting characters I don't care about.  I hate walking out of plays, but with all the movies on my list and this play doing nothing for me...

Of course, I'm sure the reviews will be extravagant in their praise.  As I'd suspected, they've been very good for the play Detroit that I saw last weekend.

Friday night I saw an old "new to me" Hitchcock movie, Marnie from 1964, playing at the Loews Jersey as the lead-in to a 50th anniversary Bond double feature on Saturday of Dr. No and Goldfinger.  I'd have seen Goldfinger if not for a party to go to Saturday night, but had to settle for Marnie.  Even though it has Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren, who was also in The Birds for Hitchcock, there are lots of good reasons why this is obscure Hitchcock.  Marnie, the character played by Tippi Hedren, is a bag of troubled woman cliches.  Sean Connery's reaction to her makes absolutely no sense at all.  The production values are kind of cheesy, scenes of people driving that look unconvincing by standards of a 1922 silent film, blatantly matte-painted backgrounds to the point that they distract from the actual important things happening in the frame.  (I'm looking at the Wikipedia entry after typing this last sentence and seeing that these were things that were picked on by critics at the time.)

However, if you've seen a lot of Hitchcock, there's so much of Hitchcock in this movie that it's fascinating to ponder on in the context of his career.  There are so many Hitchcock women like the ones here, the suave debonair matinee idol like Sean Connery is a fixture of Hitchcock's work from Farley Granger in Rope through all the Hitchcock with Cary Grant or James Stewart.  There's a very good score by Bernard Herrmann who started in film with Citizen Kane and did a number of Hitchcock films later on.

Based on a novel by Winston Graham, the screenplay is the first by Jay Presson Allen.  This gives the movie a little extra resonance for me, Jay Presson Allen wrote (with her daughter) a stage play based on The Big Love, a book by Tedd Thomey which was part of my portfolio at Scott Meredith, and it's the one time I've gotten to go to a Broadway premiere and after-party. And it turns out that Jay Presson Allen was hired to script after Evan Hunter, aka Ed McBain, and a one-time Scott Meredith employee himself, was fired.  Who knew!

The Loews Jersey has a 50'-wide screen.  There was music on the Wonder Organ before the performance.  It would be nice if they would get the balcony open, they've been talking about this for as long as I've taken in the occasional movie (they show one Fri/Sat per month from September to May).  I'm told the problem is less putting in the seats than being in a city-owned building with the city not rushing to repair the fire escapes and put in updated alarm systems.

The Name is Bilmes

I guess I could sign up for their e-mail list and learn about things well in advance, but I enjoy the serendipity in finding out wassup at the Loews Jersey only when I pick up the Village Voice and see an ad on Wednesday for something that's happening that weekend.  Of course, this may not work for very long because The Village Voice is going downhill fast like so much one finds on newsprint so who knows how long they'll think it pays to advertise.

But it works for now, so I suddenly had plans for Saturday several weeks ago when I'm leafing thru the film section of the Voice and discover that the Jersey is doing a weekend of Roger Moore James Bond movies, with For Your Eyes Only on Saturday afternoon and Octopussy that night.

My first time with James Bond was with Roger in The Spy Who Loved Me.  I know I saw it in Monticello,  NY, which was a 45-ish minute drive we would sometimes do in the old days when you had to travel further to find a movie to see.  My father drove.  I think my younger brother was with us, though sometimes my younger brother says I remember his presence incorrectly.  This was the theatre downtown; somebody at Cinema Treasures thinks here but I don't honestly remember.  I think this was the same theatre where I saw the Oliver movie musical.  I remember somewhat more the twin theatres on the outskirts of town, one or the other of which where I saw Star Wars and Interiors.  I liked The Spy Who Loved Me!

In 1979 we were going to see Moonraker at a mall multiplex in Greensboro, NC on my cross country bus tour, but then there was concern that this was rated PG and the counselors took us to see Muppet Movie instead (which was OK by me in the end; The Muppet Movie became a favorite of mine which I saw a 2nd time that summer definitely with my father and brother at the Plaza Twin in Middletown, and I believe we ended up seeing Moonraker at the Carrolls Cinema on the far side of Middletown, and I liked Moonraker!

To a lot of people older than I, I wasn't supposed to like these movies.  Campy.  Roger Moore when Sean Connery was the only good Bond.  Overblown.  But hey, I was a teenage kid, and I have no shame in saying I liked both then and still like them now.  They're what I grew up with.

For Your Eyes Only opened in 1981 when I was spending an Important Summer on my own in Cambridge.  I was doing the Harvard summer program for high school kids, staying in Weld Hall in a suite with a roommate from Minot, ND.  Our RA was a big Bloom County fan.  I took an astronomy class and a creative writing class.  I saw lots of movies at the Harvard Square, which back then was a single-screen theatre doing repertory and is now an AMC 5-plex.  I devoured books, many of which came from a wonderful sf bookstore on the second floor of an old house a few blocks down from Harvard Square.  I purchased comics in abundance from the Million Year Picnic.  In many ways, in terms of my movie-going and my sf book-buying and other things, this was a summer that helped me on my way to the person I am today.  Though not fully formed; I mostly took the T from Cambridge to Boston to see movies at the Cheri or Pi Alley. While today I wouldn't think twice if I had the time about walking from Back Bay to Harvard Square, the me of summer 1981 didn't do that sort of thing.

So For Your Eyes Only was the only movie I ever saw at the Sack Charles Cinema, on a very big screen.  I didn't like it.  As we were told during pre-show comments at the Loews Jersey, this was intentionally intended as a more down to Earth Bond movie after the extravaganzas I'd started with, and the 1981 me wanted another extravaganza.  I've hardly seen For Your Eyes Only since.  The 2009 me looks at things very differently.  For Your Eyes Only is actually a very well-paced suspense movie that takes the viewer on a nice roller coaster ride.  I don't know if I'd have gone to the Loews Jersey just to see it, but since it was playing the same day as Octopussy...

Octopussy is and remains one of my All Time Highs in the James Bond canon.  I fell in love with it the very first time I saw it at the Fox Village Theatre in Ann Arbor in the summer of 1983.  This was another summer when I was on my own, working in the Grad library at the University of Michigan and staying in a cheap summer sublet.  It was another kind of formative summer when I had my first sit-down pay-my-own-way meal at a Pizzeria Uno, and starting by then to do a little more walking, occasionally hoofing out to that theatre instead of waiting on the AATA bus.  Octopussy has a great song.  It has a typically lush John Barry score.  Louis Jourdan is wonderful as the villain giving a crowning performance that's up there with Ricardo Montalban's in Star Trek II without ever getting the same acclaim.  It's kind of neat to have James Bond saving the world but then having the movie end with the personal vengeance being taken against the villain.  Q has an enlarged role in the finale.  It's witty and campy but not so overblown and somewhat grounded in the then-current realities of the Cold War.    I don't know if I'd like it as much as I do if I hadn't been reared on the Roger Moore James Bonds.  Or if I had seen it at some other moment in my life than that particular one.  But those are what ifs. I've seen this movie as often as I can which isn't often enough because it's rare for the Roger Moore movies to get the fancy revival treatment.  I can recite parts of it by heart.  Even as some part of me was saying that really For Your Eyes Only from the afternoon and two years before was really and truly the better movie, the kid in me was relishing every moment of seeing Octopussy on the very very big screen of the Loews Jersey, and it was an all time high all over again.

The Loews Jersey, FYI, is an 80ish year old movie palace that was triplexed and then eventually closed.  A community group came together to save it, and a surprising amount of its splendor had survived the triplexing and the neglect and everything else, and volunteers have slowly restored more of it, including most recently the organ which was adding to the atmosphere for the Bond movies.  I wish they'd be able to reopen at least one of the balcony levels.  Right now the theatre is a mix of movie palace splendor and aged decay.  But bottom line is it's really something special to stand in front of the screen and look way way way up toward a projection booth that's perhaps 8 stories up and way way back there.